Cyril Dabydeen: FORGOTTEN EXILES/Short Stories. Mosaic Press, Ontario, Canada, 2024

Press Release: Ottawa-based Cyril Dabydeen’s newest volume of short stories, Forgotten Exiles, has just been released. 

In a prologue to the book, Dabydeen quotes Maya Angelou: “The greatest agony is an untold story.”  This collection shows the author’s mastery of the form after long years of writing. Here are stories of an earnestly searching soul as Dabydeen crosses boundaries where the “exile” longs for a real place with his Guyanese-Caribbean background.

 In Forgotten Exiles are stories that go back to the 1970’s when he lived in the Lake Superior region planting trees while in the quest for higher education and the search for identity. Outsider and insider images comprise his narrative forte as Dabydeen aligns north and south, hinterland and urban life of the coastal Amazon where Guyana is located with the urban landscape of Canada. The author’s sometimes poetic style, his inflection, makes the stories compelling to read with their striking metaphors, and inflection mixed in with his sometimes-dialectal rhythms.  (Note: Cyril Dabydeen is Ottawa Poet Laureate Emeritus.)

Cyril Dabydeen

He is widely published in the literary magazines in Canada, UK, USA, etc. The title story first appeared in Prairie Schooner (University of Nebraska), which later recommended him for a Pushcart Prize (for another story). 

In the sixteen stories in the collection, triangles of love associated with personal and social concerns are with imagery about race and class comprising the essence of his characters with their human foibles--as Dabydeen flits between past and present, Janus-like. He associates memory and landscape in most of the stories here, many of which are set in Ottawa where he has lived for decades.  Notably, in Forgotten Exiles, Dabydeen looks into the proverbial mirror and what’s behind the cracked glass of the mirror in lived experiences.

 His writing is aligned with his work in human rights and social service, in government, and as an educator. He taught writing for many years at the University of Ottawa. He has read his stories in Europe, USA, Canada, the Caribbean and Asia often as a guest of the International Conference of the Short Story in English coordinated in the USA.

 This new collection adds to Dabydeen’s many books of fiction (novels and previous short story volumes such as My Undiscovered Country, My Multi-Ethnic Friends and other Stories, and North of the Equator).  Many of these stories here were first published in key literary journals; and this new collection confirms Dabydeen’s status as an established writer of fiction. 

He has been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Prize for fiction, and won the Guyana top prize for his novel Drums of my Flesh (Mawenzie House).  He has also won the Okanagan Fiction Prize, the Canute A. Brodhurst Prize, is a shortlisted finalist of the Ottawa Book Prize (fiction), recommended for a Pushcart Prize via Prairie Schooner (USA) for fiction, and also recommended for a Journey Prize.  

Dabydeen is sometimes better known as a poet because of his Ottawa Poet Laureateship (emeritus) role, and with his major poetry collections such as Imaginary Origins: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK). The Canadian Parliament described him as “a noted Canadian poet” (Hansard, April 24,2001).  He has done over 300 readings from his books in Canada, US, UK and Europe, the Caribbean, and in Asia. 

This new fiction collection enhances what has been said about his stories being “the epiphany, the moment of illumination, which comes out of an ordinary experience” (World Literature Today/University of Oklahoma). 

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EXCERPTS OF REVIEWS:

“I know it's like all your work--astute in politics and artful in poetics.”

--George Elliot Clarke (Parliamentary Poet Laureate Emeritus).

“Cyril Dabydeen...he is a consistent and eloquent witness of the man-on-the-way, the traveller, the pilgrim. He captures the spirit of the displaced, the dislocated, and the alien within the Canadian experience.”

--Canadian Ethnic Studies (University of Calgary)

“There is a kaleidoscopic quality to these short stories, a shifting and colliding of the bits of coloured glass held up to the light. Much to share that is not necessarily easy to render in a short story format.”

-- Montreal Serai. 

“It is the epiphany, the moment of illumination, which comes out of an ordinary experience.”

-- Peter Nazareth (University of Iowa), World Literature Today

“Dabydeen is a short story master.”

--Canadian Literature. 

“Unique background and stellar writing.”

--Fred D’Aguiar, Director of Creative Writing, Virginia Tech University, USA.

“…interesting and thought-provoking…well worth reading carefully...I have enjoyed your stories, and I have enjoyed reading them in this new collection!”

--David Staines, Dean of Arts, University of Ottawa

“Cyril Dabydeen creates imagery, narratively and metaphorically, that confronts his diasporic condition. His characters are deep and psychologically complex, conflicting and not conflicting with the natural and human environments encompassing them.”

-- Cultural and Pedagogical Enquiry, University of Alberta

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Cyril Dabydeen

Email: cdabydeen@ncf.ca

Phone: 613-230-7854

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Setu, November 2024